Out in the dark there was sometimes laughter, sometimes screaming. Just like our camp. And some nights the sergeant would appear. It had to be in darkness and he came silent as a sniper, creeping along the wire towards me.
Look, sarge, I would say. I’m on your side.
Though he did not reply his mouth would make a bubble. And then he would laugh, a dark man the sergeant, from some southern tribe, black hair on his belly and his billyclub with a bloody ferrule.
Washed was he? Where was the water to wash in the Badiet esh Sham? There was no pool there, no tarn and no tarp to trap the dew. Even in that dry air he smelt like a mule.
Whose side? he would whisper.
And I would look at the whipcord in his cock and see that the border ran even there.
Whose side? he would hiss.
Your side, sarge, I would answer, the wind blowing, the sugar papers trapped on the wire, Orion and the madman’s stars almost overhead.
Such a story. And everybody who comes to the island has a story like that. So now their stories are my story. Here on Old Mint Street, on Triq Zekka where I live on sour wine, on bread and honey, here at this stained table I have discovered duty.
And did I tell you? I meant to tell you. Melitta is coming tomorrow. She will be the first one to hear what the soldier said. Then she will sit and sip the Zeppi’s prickly pear liqueur I have bought and she will see the laptop screen blossom with one white star. And then I will explain to her everything that lies ahead.
Maria
August 13, 9 a.m. Anthem, Arizona, USA
Anthem is forty miles north. Not so far. But it is a problem today. And maybe a problem tomorrow. But she doubts it. And the day after? There will be no more problems. Because the day after, at least the Honda will be fixed. Jesus has promised her. Two days max. But he will be repairing it in the street because Jesus doesn’t have a garage. So Jesus will turn up this morning and get to work on the avenue where she parked, one hundred yards from the apartment. Jesus is her saviour. And unmarried too. Bless him. The car will be almost untouchable today.
Every morning, when Maria walked to the car, she was surprised to see it still there. But the gangs would never take a Honda Civic. A powder-blue Civic with primer patches? No way. A Civic is an invisible car. It speaks of insignificance. Of poverty. Oh yes, Maria had chosen well. Maria had chosen as she had always chosen. Maria knew how to choose.
This is the place they say the bus will stop. Yet to Maria it doesn’t look like a bus station. It is a car park with a few bigger spaces crossed by white lines. But there is an office and the woman there with her orange lipstick and orange hair tells her in Spanish, yes, the minibus will come. Soon. Maria had tried to explain that she needs the bus to stop on the highway, that, for mercy’s sake, she doesn’t want to go all the way to Flagstaff. The woman had shrugged and rolled her eyes.
Maria thought about where she was going. She was going to Anthem, to 509 East Adamanda Court, off North Fifth Street in Anthem. First day at the job, her new job with the Chernowskis at their wonderful home.
Anthem, Jacob Chernowski had told her, is not merely a town. It’s a lifestyle. When Larry died, Maria had gone to the service.
You were so good to my father, Chernowski had told her at the Mortensen King’s Funeral Center. So good. And Jacob had taken Maria’s fingers in his damp fingers, stooping over her, the wurlitzer CD playing as an accompaniment, ‘The Breeze and I’ leaking out of the sound system like old times.
Three months later Jacob had turned up at the Sunset care home in Black Canyon City. They had sat on the bench under the cottonwood, the Goliath Laundry van come to deliver, the sun dazzling off the Chevron sign.
I’ll come to the point, he said, looking down at the dead cottonwood leaves. Mrs Chernowski’s not so robust. The new place in Anthem is such a big house. Keeping it as she wishes it to be kept is… arduous.
He seemed pleased with the word.
Yes, arduous.
You want me to…?
Yes, he said. Please. And once again he had taken her hand.
Of course, we can offer a fair salary. Perhaps something better than…
The Sunset’s been good to me…
As we would, smiled Jacob. As indeed we would.
In the end, Maria had to scream. The driver didn’t want to stop. He said he couldn’t stop, that there was nowhere on Highway 1-17 he was allowed to stop.
But there is Anthem, Maria shouted. There on the right. And they were passing it. So Maria screamed and the driver braked in a cloud of gravel and the Navistar behind blasted its klaxon, and as soon as Maria’s feet touched the road the minibus was moving away, workmen laughing and waving in the back, and she was on a ledge spread with chippings and Wendy’s wrappers, and from there it looked a long way down into the as yet unincorporated town of Anthem.
At least she was wearing the right shoes. That was how she saw it. When God gave a woman big feet he made sure she learned about shoes. You give, you take. Maria went sideways down the hill, past a fallen saguaro the colour of bad teeth, over broken kerbstones and piles of cement. The ground was loose. She slid through the goldenbush in a slurry of Heineken bottles. But at the bottom the earth was baked firm.
Maria crossed a culvert where an arroyo might run, yellow plastic tubing coming out of the ground, empty oil drums everywhere. She climbed up the other side of the stream bed, and stood where she hoped a sidewalk might start. But there was only the road. And no road sign.
She looked around and breathed out. It was hot. Maria knew how hot it was. It was 116oF hot. She was usually correct about such things. And she thought about Jacob Chernowski’s hands, clammy as the air conditioning at the funeral center.
So, this is Anthem, she smiled to herself. Anthem was completely silent. Not a soul. Above, far above, a hawk was a black cursor in the blue.
You live, she thought. You learn. A lifestyle experience. A lifestyle like the grave.
Maria turned to the right on nothing more than a hunch. Somewhere nearby was 509, East Adamanda Court. The blinds closed, the air cool. Mrs Chernowski would be lying in her bedroom. Soon Mrs Chernowski would require Maria’s tomato soup. Yes, soon that soup would be a vermilion shadow on her lip.
And downstairs, Jacob Chernowski would sit at a computer, waiting for his software update. He would come out to the kitchen and enquire about nopalitos. There was lots of prickly pear, he would venture, in the back yard. Sometimes he stooped to sniff their pink fruit.
Maria’s shoes were dusty but she was humming to herself, humming ‘The Breeze and I’ and adjusting the grip of her modest overnight bag. Next time she comes there will be no such trouble.
Nerys
August 13, 11 p.m. Theodore’s salvage yard, Bridgend, Wales
The Captain says I can burn some of the wood in this oildrum. Those rotten spars, he says. The chapel wainscoting that was already wormy when he pulled it out of Nebo.
So tonight I do it. Chill in the air, summer mist like a spider’s web. Soon there’s a fire and it’s alive in the stained glass, the windows they took from a pub in Cardiff, the Brain’s blue diamond flashing indigo at the night, the glass in the yard leaping out at me, yellow these stars, the red almost black, red as that girl’s black blood I once saw on the roadside in Chechnya as we marched past.
I melted the dinosaur today. Jason’s let me go, he says there’s nothing on. So I’m in the fairground full time. Rides, odd jobs, whatever they want. Unscrewed a Sky satellite dish this morning, off the Showman’s Motel. Up a ladder so it was hard to get a grip. In the end I had to jemmy the bracket away, and the dish came off in my hands. But so light, it had rusted through. I didn’t think they were supposed to do that but the sea air eats anything. Gets behind things, the boys say. Gets inside you. And then we did the dinosaur in the wood.
There used to be a model village there, houses, shops, blue-painted bay. But no one’s interested now so we bust it up with mauls and shovelled the tiles into th
e skip. Over in the trees there was only one dinosaur left. The fairground people used to charge trippers to wander round this prehistoric park, there were even cavemen the boys told me, and the trees like tropical trees. Tall ferns, sharp leaves. But that’s mostly gone. Some bigshot’s building a house there for his kids.
I looked at this dinosaur. It had eyes like traffic lights. Like these salvaged traffic lights here winking in the firelight around me. Huge thing, that dinosaur. Life size. But made of plastic, so I could pick it up myself. I got the chainsaw, cut its head off and put it in the incinerator. Watched those eyes melt away, the teeth dissolve, the smoke all black and yellow, me coughing, throat stinging. Then those spines on its neck, its armour, then the green-painted belly and then the long tail, the very long tail I sawed into strips like firewood. And apart from the ballast it was hollow inside.
So that was it. The dinosaurs are extinct. Just a pool of plastic left on the firebricks. Somebody came over complaining about the smell till the boys persuaded him to leave. And it was the boys told me about this place. Because although the fair’s busy now at peak time, the money’s not there. Plenty of people passing through, the boys say, but they’re looking, not stopping. One of the rides has been playing ‘Money’s too tight to Mention’, blasting it over town.
There’s a last bus out at eleven. I get to this recovery yard by half past. And that’s enough for The Captain. He’s the owner. Says it’s just, just about good enough. Because he’s in all hours. So I’m here all night till seven, home by eight, start in the fair at twelve. Four hours sleep if I eat on the job.
Sometimes the Captain’s around when I arrive, and then we sit in his cabin. I love it there, charts on the wall, golden gimbals off a gyroscope spinning on the desk.
He says himself he’s out of date. Admits he hasn’t a clue anymore what’s in the yard. Everything’s done cash. So I’ve told him, look boss, I could put an inventory on a computer for you. First rule of buying and selling, I say, is know your stock.
Where you from? he asks me then. But he always asks me that.
Vilnius, I say.
Oh yes, he says. Docked there once. Nice port.
And I smile and say nothing and he might get his brandy out and we have a tot each, but only a tot, because he has to drive home, he says. Be up and at it all over again in the morning.
There’s no room to move in the cabin. There are two glass cases with a stuffed owl and a stuffed magpie from Penyfai Primary School, a moth-eaten hound the Captain says is from the fair. Even Nebo’s harmonium with its ivory knobs.
By about 2 a.m. he’ll have told me the history of half the junk in the yard and the taxi will be waiting by the padlocked gate. Know him of old, they do, the Captain, the Captain waddling through his alleyways and avenues between the banisters and the newel posts, the graveyard angels with their outspread wings and marble bibles, the big old-fashioned chimney pots like the crowns of pantomime kings.
When he’s gone I’m left to it, guarding his empire, the world he’s salvaged and stored at the arse-end of an industrial estate. First the stone, the lintels and the gravestones, the cracked kitchen tiles and the immovable farmhouse flags. Then the wood, the rotten gates and rottener window frames, the doors stacked like playing cards. I’ve seen a school honour board from the 1930s around here somewhere, gold writing on black wood. Yes, a man’s time comes and a man’s time goes.
In these light nights and early mornings I’ve wandered the yard but still don’t trust my way. There are aisles I’ve never explored, rusted dead-ends, caverns under tarpaulins where whatever was precious is now mould and ash. He’s tried to protect it all from the weather, but as the boys say, the wet gets behind things. Buckets where nails have rusted together, like sea urchins. Toilet bowls with cushiony moss, a grandfather clock with a pendulum seized at the waist.
But when I sit with him in the cabin I feel relaxed. Yes, maybe I’m home now. In Vilnius they are ripping the old things out, stripping it, selling it on. As if they are cleaning themselves of our dirty history.
Where you from? the Captain asks, and I smile, but Vilnius is vanishing even as I speak. When I wander these lanes at night, between the stone and the wood, the doors and the mirrors, I almost feel I am back in Uzupis, the walls crumbling, the iron street lights crooked across my path.
Maybe I’ll keep on at the Captain about the inventory. Better than scraping varnish at Hafan, and the rides have only six weeks left. Virgilijs says he’s going home then.
Now in the firelight the angels loom over me, angels of the dead with their empty books. Sometimes I stroke the angel wings, the angel breasts, but they’re cold as the gods of Soviet spring. And in the firelight, in this yard, I might be in the forests once again, passing round the birch sap, that sweet, spunk-coloured wine we all drank then, talking about freedom, but never dreaming it would be like this.
Big little man
August 13, 7 p.m. Druid, Saskatchewan, Canada
This time he was driving a Cherokee. It made him feel tall, its rusty red the only colour on that prairie. He put it in park and looked at the map again. West of Plenty, east of Superb. Yes, surely, he had arrived. This was journey’s end.
The Big Little Man stepped down to the dirt. There was nothing forgiving about this earth. Summer baked it, winter provided an impenetrable exoskeleton. In Huangshan, the earth had been black. Or red, perhaps. Red as the Cherokee. But how soft the earth was at home and how the water buffalo loved to wallow in its pools, the pigs to bury their snouts in its velvet. That was good earth where the tea bushes grew, the tea gardens his parents tended on the hillside, where he crawled under the greenery as the stars came out, staring into mantis eyes.
Here I am, he said to himself, and the Big Little Man touched the demon’s face he carried on a cord around his neck, the grinning dragon-demon carved from water buffalo bone, a gift from his sister when he told them he was leaving. Where was that sister now? In Huangshan, selling sunflowers and the loose green tea she picked herself, an old woman still living with the pigs, eating with her fingers from the bowl.
He stretched and scanned the horizon in every direction. Yes, he must have arrived. The map assured him that this was the town of Druid. But of Druid there was no trace. No roadsign or ruin knew Druid now, Druid on its map of silence. True, four hundred yards away a grain elevator broke the skyline. He followed its dazzling azimuth, the prairie on all sides silvered by dust in the irrigation ditches.
Everywhere there were tyre tracks in the dirt, as if men had arrived and waited, waited and chewed gum, waited and spat. And then driven on. Or been taken away. Yes, that was it. Taken.
Very good, the Big Little Man thought.
At last. At last he understood. Druid had vanished. To the final paling. The whole town had been taken. Druid had existed and now Druid did not exist.
And its people? Its horses and pigs, its shock-shot Cherokees and rusted Rancheros, its satellite dishes, its children’s bikes? All cleared away.
No, he thought. Not cleaned up. But taken. Their possessions were taken when the people were taken. Everything they owned was taken. So they need not be afraid.
The Big Little man looked up. The sky was darker now. Soon it would be green-black, with fire within it. There was one star in the north. The star was getting bigger, the star was as great as the Buddha’s light his mother had showed him once in the mountains, the misty mountains where the cloud clung to his skin and they stood on a ledge and looked down on an ocean that was not really there, looked down from Heavenly City Peak. Then from Purple Cloud Peak.
Train coming, the Big Little Man said to himself. Train coming with its grilled headlamp, its white ditch lights. And he laughed, the star bigger still, the northern air rushing over the dust.
He thought again about the girl. As he had arrived, the girl had disappeared. On the hourly bulletins he heard of search parties, difficult terrain, a girl in stonewashed jeans and saskatoonberry sweatshirt.
; Once, her father had spoken. Everyone was hushed. Her father talked uncertainly, with a trace of hurt, suspicious of the silence he discovered grown about him. He was unable to explain how a twelve year old had dashed away to hide while her sister counted ten, one hundred, ready or not, and kept on hiding.
Maybe a grizzly, someone said, igniting old stories of bears running into the woods, children plucked like pasque flowers from the sweetgrass. Old timers nodded. Child smell. Young meat. They brought bears round.
But all the bears were microchipped, the phone-ins said. And slowly that girl went missing from the news.
It was darker yet. The air rushed by.
Train coming, said the Big Little Man. And closed his eyes.
Juan
August 13, 5 p.m. Roadside outside Cachi, province of Salta, Argentina
They found a room above L’Aquila bar in Cachi. There was no aircon and the town baked. He and the woman lay abed, the woman who had trusted him, the skinny, redheaded woman, lying in her sodden underwear, delirious beside him.
Juan remembered the journey. The land rolling on. Telegraph wires, burned forest, a strawberry sow belly-belted to a tree. He had studied the birds. Doves, parakeets, and, like sentries, those villainous, anvil-headed hawks at the roadside, some glory crushed to grimness within them, a carrion majesty.
After that room another room. Bed, table, a window over the Ninth of July Plaza and its palms. Shoeshiners packing up, waggling their thumbs at each other, those flat and ebonised thumbs. And the fan’s engine, the soundtrack to their days, plastic and brass grinding together, impossible to ignore but how quickly he learned to ignore it, turning on the television he would not turn off, despite the woman’s protestations, surfing towards the Disaster Channel.
Keys of Babylon Page 20